On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:46:33PM -0400, Lew wrote:
>> upgrades to PG, it is our duty to inform our bosses of the risk of not
>> upgrading, so they can properly assess risks and manage them accordingly.
>
> I agree. It is, by the same token, your duty to yourself to ensure
> that, if the answer is, "No," you get that answer in writing so that
> future failures are not possibly pinned on you as having been
> negligent in installing stability and security releases.
>
> By the way, I always refer to these of late as "security and
> stability" rather than "minor" releases. I do that because it
> presents them to the target audience in a way that is understandable.
> Those releases are, for the project, a maintenance burden and not a
> way to introduce features. It's wise to keep that in mind when
> presenting such releases to managers responsible for the decision.
I used to work for an Oracle DBA and while he was quite smart in most
ways, he really had been trained by Oracle to avoid anything but
"patches". Upgrades / updates of a db were very scary for him. I had
to present the minor updates as "patch releases" to get him
comfortable with them. And have a full implementation plan and all
that as well.
But if instead he had insisted on running an outdated version of
PostgreSQL for some goofy reason I would have been looking for another
job.
I guess I've been lucky in that I've never actually had to work for
idiots. Sure have interviewed with quite a few though.